Items tagged with SOPA

Google has released a 26-page report detailing how it strives to balance the rights of copyright owners against fair use policies and individual users. The search giant has come under increasing fire from copyright owners over the past few years, and faced repeated accusations that it earns enormous amounts of money from the ads that run on pirate websites. Meanwhile, the company's YouTube takedown policy has been criticized at times from the other end, particularly when it's used to remove content that someone else found inconvenient, embarrassing, or just didn't like One of the changes Google...Read more...

On any given day in the United States you will find a number of really, really terrible ideas being floated as smart decisions. Flying to Hawaii to give birth in the ocean surrounded by dolphins. A drunk man repeatedly directing traffic in midtown Manhattan. And, today, from the USA Intellectual Property Theft Commission, a 90 page report on the state of IP around the world, the dangers posed to American IP by the Internet, and one remarkable suggestion on how to fix the problem. Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information....Read more...

“Zeitgeist” is a word that should be in everyone’s vocabulary. Roughly meaning “spirit of the times”, the term sums up so many things about a culture at a given point in history. Google has a Zeitgeist 2012 website that shows the world’s most searched topics from this past year, broken down by subject, type of search, and country. The site’s description on the page is short and sweet and reads in full: “2012 was a year of big moments, from global games to historical elections and everything in between. With this site, we've analyzed over one trillion...Read more...

There's a bill currently up for debate in the US House of Representatives that would give companies and government agencies the right to share information when issues of cybersecurity were at stake. If the first thing you thought after reading that was "Wait, don't we already do this," the answer is "Yes, we do." The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) is drawing fire for certain provisions that drastically expand the definition of what data can be shared and for the way they handle existing data protections. At present, the government's ability to share data on its citizens is...Read more...

The impact of piracy on the music business has been studied in detail, but the relationship between illegal downloads and film revenue hasn't been explored to nearly the same degree. A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan and Wellesely College has examined the impact of BitTorrent on domestic and foreign ticket sales and come back with some interesting conclusions. The results of the study are being somewhat erroneously reported as "Piracy doesn't hurt the movie industry" but the truth is rather more nuanced. What the researchers found was that in the US, the drop-off in movie...Read more...

The Internet's opposition to the Congressional bill SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) has reached a fever pitch, even as the bill's primary backers have first retreated from its most damning provisions, then fled altogether. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, announced today that the site would go dark to protest the bill. "Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!," Wales tweeted. It's not clear if Wikipedia will simply go down or if it plans to join sites like Reddit in replacing normal content with links and information on why SOPA threatens the underlying...Read more...

Internet domain registrar GoDaddy isn't afraid to ruffle a few feathers, because if it was, it would never run all those sexually suggestive ads during the Super Bowl and at other times during the year. But what really got GoDaddy in hot water was the fact that it was supporting the "Stop Online Piracy Act," or SOPA. When word got out that GoDaddy was backing the controversial bill, it was like a 'Flame On!' button for the Internet community at large, and so GoDaddy has wisely chosen to reverse its support. "Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working...Read more...

Yesterday, we covered comments from the RIAA on how it believes courts have weakened the DMCA to the point of uselessness and why the organization supports the highly controversial E-PARASITE Act. It's not the first time we've covered the controversial legislation, but the leader of the RIAA, Cary Sherman, has weighed in with his own personal views and rebuttal. It's unusual for the head of the RIAA to directly confront such criticism, and it's worth revisiting the topic to evaluate his response. Sherman's argument rests on two premises. First, it should be unacceptable to any of us involved in...Read more...